Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky (introduction)

INTRODUCTION

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o the Western reader, Andrei Sinyavsky’s—or, more accurately, Abram Tertz’s—Strolls with Pushkin must seem an unlikely contender for the title of most controversial book published in the Soviet Union during the glasnost period. Appearing just as censorship was entering the final stages of collapse, which allowed Soviet readers access to a bewildering profusion of sensational historical revelations and previously repressed literature, this slim, playful, stylistically difficult and esoteric work devoted to a nineteenth-century poet should, one would think, have gotten lost in the shuffle. Yet when the journal October printed a four-page excerpt from Strolls with Pushkin in April 1989, it unleashed a storm of outrage, which polarized the literary intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad and spilled over into the popular press. Cries that Sinyavsky was a “russophobe” who had “defiled Russia’s national treasure” sounded repeatedly in the press and at writers’ meetings throughout the autumn of 1989. One of Sinyavsky’s most outspoken critics even compared him to Salman Rushdie, appealing to the Russian readership to emulate the example of those Muslim fundamentalists who had protested the publication of the Satanic Verses and stopping just short of approving the Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to murder the author.1 The vehemence of the reaction to this

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first Soviet publication of Strolls with Pushkin bears witness to the sensitivity of the topic as well as to its author’s gift for challenging the status quo and for performing virtuoso linguistic juggling tricks with the sacred cows of Russian and Soviet culture.

Sinyavsky’s career began quietly enough. He studied literature at Moscow University during the postwar years and in 1952, the year before Stalin’s death, he completed the requirements for his candidate degree (roughly equivalent to an American doctorate) and went on to receive an appointment at the prestigious Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, embarking on a promising career as a literary scholar and critic. By the middle of the next decade he was publishing essays and reviews in the Soviet Union’s premier literary journal, New World (Novy mir), had co-authored books on early Soviet poetry and on Picasso, and had written a lengthy introduction to a new edition of Pasternak’s poetry, establishing his reputation as a rising liberal voice in Soviet cultural life.

In the mid-1950s, however, Sinyavsky literally began leading a double life. Disillusioned with the Soviet system—because of attempts to recruit him as a KGB informer, the arrest of his father, and the growing divergence between his own tastes in literature and art and those prescribed by the regime—he took the decision to have certain of his writings that could not be published in his homeland smuggled out of the country for publication abroad. The first of these works to appear in the West was a literary manifesto of sorts entitled What Is Socialist Realism, which was published in 1959.

The essay is an ironic tour de force in which Sinyavsky’s narrator poses as a defender of the officially sanctioned Soviet approach to art subsumed under the label socialist realism in order, ultimately, to turn the tradition upside down by subverting it from within.

Pointing out the internal inconsistencies in the practice of socialist realism, Sinyavsky concludes by rejecting its subordination of literature to an extraliterary purpose—furthering the building of

communism—and ends the essay with what might be considered his literary credo: In the given case, I place my hopes on a phantasmagoric art with hypotheses instead of a purpose and grotesque in lieu of realistic descriptions of everyday life. It would correspond more fully to the spirit of our day. Let the exaggerated images of Hoffmann, Dostoevsky, Goya, and the most socialist of them all, Mayakovsky, and of many other realists and nonrealists teach us how to be truthful with the help of absurd fantasy.

In losing our faith, we did not lose our ecstasy at the metamorphoses of God that take place before our eyes, at the monstrous peristalsis of his intestines—the convolutions of the brain. We don’t know where to go, not having understood that there is nothing to be done, we begin to think, to construct conjectures, to suggest. Perhaps we will think up something amazing. But it will no longer be socialist realism.2

Following this essay, between 1959 and 1965 three novellas, six short stories, and a brief collection of aphorisms by Sinyavsky appeared in Western publications under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. The fictional works were, in essence, exemplars of the purposeless, phantasmagoric art invoked at the end of What Is Socialist Realism, what Sinyavsky would later come to call (using a term apparently coined by Dostoevsky) fantastic realism. This approach to literature is in turn intimately related conceptually to Sinyavsky’s pseudonym. Borrowed from Abrashka Tertz, a legendary Jewish bandit whose exploits are celebrated in an Odessa thieves’ song, the pseudonym identifying the writer as an outlaw has remained Sinyavsky’s trademark and alter ego long since it outlived its practical usefulness as a blind protecting him from detection by the Soviet authorities.3 Introduction

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The dodge worked for six years, but in October 1965 Sinyavsky was arrested along with his friend Yuly Daniel, who, with Sinyavsky’s help, had also secretly sent works abroad for publication under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak. The trial, which lasted four days in February 1966, drew the battle lines between the government, which was tightening its controls over cultural life after the Khrushchev “thaw,” and the burgeoning dissident movement. It was preceded by a virulent press campaign painting the two writers, whose works were completely unknown to average Soviet readers, as turncoats who had betrayed their Soviet homeland and sold out to the ideological interests of the West. The authorities were evidently trying to script a show trial reminiscent of the Stalin years, but the key actors failed to play their parts docilely. In the wake of the relative freedom of the Khrushchev years, a certain segment of the Soviet intelligentsia refused to submit quietly to the official line and rallied in support of Sinyavsky and Daniel, and the two defendants, even after more than four months of pre-trial incarceration, staunchly pleaded innocent at the trial, delivering eloquent speeches in their own defense.4 Despite protests both at home and abroad, Sinyavsky and Daniel were found guilty of “anti-Soviet agitation” under article 70 of the Soviet penal code and sentenced, respectively, to seven and five years at hard labor. The two writers were transported to different labor camps in the Dubrovlag system near Potma in Mordovia.

Daniel served out his sentence there, and was released a year later, in 1971.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Sinyavsky’s career is that he wrote what would become his most controversial book while imprisoned in Dubrovlag. In a 1990 interview, Sinyavsky explained how he managed to write Strolls with Pushkin and send it out in letters to his wife, Mariya Rozanova, while under constant surveillance by the authorities:

I realized that I had to come up with something, and I thought up the idea of incorporating my writing into letters. Letters are usually written at one sitting, and in this I was aided by a misfortune. There was a restriction on letters—you could mail only two letters a month.

Fortunately, there was no restriction on their length. Of course it was forbidden to send a very long letter, but you could write twenty pages in tiny but very neat handwriting, so that it would be easier for the censor to read. And I realized that these letters were getting through and even suited the camp authorities and the censor. What is the most criminal thing you can do in the camps? There are two things: to criticize the Soviet government and to meddle in politics or describe the horrors of camp life: to complain that you’re badly fed, you’re sick all the time, etc.—that was forbidden. And I used the ploy . . . well, sometimes, so as not to forget completely, I would betake myself to talk about Pushkin—in the guise of what looked to be random thoughts, but were in fact an already thoroughly conceived book—and Mariya caught on to this and separated out all of these passages and collected them together. I came back from the camp, and the book was already done.5

In the same fashion, Sinyavsky completed the first chapter of a book on Gogol while imprisoned, and when he returned home to Moscow after his release he compiled an introspective camp memoir also out of passages from his letters to his wife.

These works represent both a continuation and a further development of Sinyavsky’s earlier writings. Strolls with Pushkin in effect initiated a new literary genre: fantastic literary scholarship (fantasticheskoe literaturovedenie). Sinyavsky has described this approach to writing about literature as a departure from traditional scholarly writing in which the writer can develop whimsical hypotheses and, in relation to accepted convention, deliberately do things “wrong”: Introduction

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When a person takes up the study of art, he can write an academic work or he can act just as he would in fantastic realism. After all art is the same objective reality as reality is. That means that it can be portrayed in different ways, emphasizing some things, exaggerating, sometimes turning them upside down. By the way, that’s why people say that everything is wrong in those works [Sinyavsky’s books on Pushkin and Gogol]. But sometimes it’s done wrong consciously.

It was simply amusing to write a scholarly monograph on Pushkin while in a labor camp. But some things I simply broke first, the way you break a toy, and glued them back together a new way.6

This playful and, from the point of view of traditional literary studies, perverse approach to literature brought down on Sinyavsky the ire of those in his culture who had an investment in things being done “right.”

In 1973 Sinyavsky was allowed to emigrate with his wife and son to France. The family took up residence in the small town of Fontenay-aux-Roses just outside Paris, and Sinyavsky was offered a professorship at the Sorbonne, where he has taught Russian literature ever since. He has also continued, now openly, to pursue his double career as Professor Andrei Sinyavsky and writer-outlaw Abram Tertz, signing his own name to what he terms “academic” works, as well as to overtly polemical political writings, and his pseudonym to works he considers “fantastic” or “exaggerated.” His camp works were published in the West in the years following his emigration—A Voice from the Chorus (his camp memoir) in 1973 and Strolls with Pushkin and In the Shadow of Gogol in 1975. In emigration Sinyavsky has written two books published under the Tertz pseudonym, the novella Little Tsores and the novel Goodnight!, and three books published under his own name, a scholarly monograph on the philosopher Vasily Rozanov and studies of Russian and

Soviet culture entitled Soviet Civilization and Ivan the Fool: An Essay on Russian Popular Faith.

Although both of Sinyavsky’s personae have continued in emigration to carry on active and productive careers, even in the West neither Sinyavsky’s nor Tertz’s life has been free of controversy.

Initially welcomed by the Russian émigré cultural establishment, Sinyavsky increasingly found himself at odds with some of its more powerful figures over their Russian chauvinism and antisemitism. In 1978, disgusted with the politics of émigré journalism, Mariya Rozanova began publishing the journal Syntax out of the Sinyavsky house. Originally conceived as an outlet solely for Sinyavsky’s works, Syntax from the beginning attracted contributors from both the emigration and the Soviet Union. The enterprise soon expanded to include a publishing house of the same name, which also operates out of the Sinyavsky home. In publishing not only Sinyavsky’s articles and books but also works by authors who fall outside the mainstream of émigré publishing, the journal and publishing house have earned Sinyavsky and Rozanova a reputation as renegades from the émigré cultural establishment. Sinyavsky has contributed to that reputation by writing articles directed against the conservative nationalist camp, in particular polemicizing with the most visible exponent of its platform, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

By the same token, just as Sinyavsky’s political articles have turned him into something of a pariah in the émigré community, so too his Tertz works have drawn fire and none more than Strolls with Pushkin. Its original publication in Russian in the West called forth indignant protests from émigré critics, who, in viewing the book as an attack on Pushkin, forestalled the later Soviet response.

Thus, over the course of a quarter century Sinyavsky-Tertz has three times found himself at the center of a scandal that polarized Soviet or émigré Russian culture. Beginning with his trial and

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continuing through the blowups over the publication of Strolls with Pushkin in emigration and in the USSR—he has been accused of hating and betraying his homeland, of “trampling on all that is most holy” in its culture.7 The tenor and intensity of the accusations leveled at Sinyavsky over the years are particularly surprising considering that his Tertz works strive neither for political sensationalism nor for a mass audience. Clearly he has managed—most successfully in Strolls with Pushkin—to touch a very sensitive nerve in Russian culture, whether émigré or Soviet. The beginning of an answer to the riddle of the explosive nature of Strolls with Pushkin is embedded in the title of the work itself. “Strolls” denotes aimless movement—not subordinated to some higher purpose—which may violate official borders and therefore may end in trespassing on forbidden territory. In fact, Sinyavsky’s work is built completely on these principles, the text rambling over boundaries and treading on space traditionally held sacred in Russian culture. Sinyavsky himself has said, “I only find it interesting to write if there is a prohibition, a taboo.”8 To understand the taboo that he violates in Strolls with Pushkin, let us survey the ground that Sinyavsky is traversing—the life and works of his companion in his strolls, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Pushkin’s afterlife in Russian culture.

ɷɸɷ Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on May 26, 1799,9 into a boyar family that could trace its lineage back for centuries. Throughout his life, Pushkin was proud to the point of hypersensitivity of his aristocratic pedigree and did not suffer what he considered social slurs lightly. In 1830 he wrote that “the names of my ancestors are met with every minute in our history,”10 and he on occasion incorporated references to his forebears into his works.

In this connection by far Pushkin’s most colorful ancestor, and the

one who apparently most vividly engaged the poet’s imagination, was his maternal great grandfather Ibrahim Hannibal. According to family legend, Hannibal was the son of an Abyssinian prince.

In 1705 a Russian envoy found him living as a hostage at the court of the Turkish sultan and took the boy back to Petersburg as a gift to Peter the Great. The tsar made Hannibal his godson, sent him to France for military training, and after Hannibal’s return to Russia appointed him an officer in his own crack Preobrazhensky Regiment. Hannibal lived to a ripe old age—according to Pushkin into his nineties—and in the course of his military career attained the rank of general. For his services he was granted by Peter’s daughter the Empress Elizabeth a number of estates, including the estate at Mikhailovskoe, which was to play such an important role in Pushkin’s own life.

Pushkin’s fascination with his African ancestry remained a leitmotif of his life and work. In the first chapter of Evgeny Onegin, his narrator speaks of “sighing for gloomy Russia under the sky of my Africa,” and his first attempt at prose was a fictionalized biography of his great grandfather, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great. Though there is some disagreement among contemporary descriptions of Pushkin, reference to his “Negroid features” was standard, as evidenced by an incident from the poet’s early life: “In his childhood years Pushkin was not a robust child and had all the African features of physiognomy he had as an adult; but when he was a little boy, his hair was so curly and so elegantly crimped by his African nature that one day [the poet] I. I. Dmitriev said to me: ‘Look, he is a real little Moor.’”11 Pushkin grew up in Moscow, spending summers at the estate of his maternal grandmother, Marya Alekseevna Hannibal, at Zakharovo. Marya Alekseevna was noted for her elegant command of Russian, and it is apparently from her that Pushkin received his first real exposure to his native tongue since, following the custom of Introduction

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the time, French was the dominant language in the Pushkin home.

Pushkin never recorded his memories of his childhood, but by virtually all accounts his mother and father left much to be desired as parents. His mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, a capricious and moody woman, was a noted society beauty who was often referred to by the nickname “the beautiful creole.” His father, Sergei Lvovich, was reputed to be extremely tightfisted while at the same time squandering money on gambling and social pursuits and allowing himself to be robbed by his peasants.

Yet although Pushkin may have received little real nurturing from his parents, the ambiance created by his family must certainly have fostered his literary interests. His father was an assiduous raconteur known in society circles for his wit, and seems even to have written poetry in French. Pushkin’s mother, for her part, ceded little to her husband in either social graces or knowledge of French literature. Moreover, Pushkin’s uncle Vasily Lvovich Pushkin was a minor poet in his own right, known primarily for his epigrams and fables, and as much of a social gadfly as his brother. Through his uncle, Pushkin as a child met a number of the most famous literary figures of the day, including the prose writer and historiographer Nikolai Karamzin and the poet Konstantin Batyushkov. More important, perhaps, Pushkin had access to his father’s extensive library, which consisted primarily of French classics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and from an early age he became a voracious reader.

In June 1811 Pushkin left his family home, apparently with few regrets, for Petersburg, to be enrolled as a member of the first class to attend the newly founded lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, an institution conceived with the goal of training the sons of the nobility for service to the state. The official opening of the lycée, attended by the tsar and other dignitaries, was held on October 19, a date that

Pushkin commemorated in his poetry to the end of his life. Pushkin remained at the lycée for six years, until his graduation in June 1817.

As his continuing devotion to the institution testified, these years were among the happiest of Pushkin’s life, and the friends he made there—among them Baron Anton Delvig, Wilhelm Kyukhelbeker, and Ivan Pushchin—became a surrogate family to him.

An indifferent student, excelling in those subjects he liked and doing poorly in those he found uninteresting, Pushkin soon gained a reputation for his literary gifts, and his devotion to poetry was looked on indulgently by at least some instructors, as Ivan Pushchin recalled: All the professors looked on in reverence at Pushkin’s growing talent. In mathematics class Kartsev once called him to the blackboard and gave him a problem in algebra. For a long time Pushkin shifted from one foot to the other, all the time writing some kind of formulas. Kartsev finally asked him, “Well, what is the answer? What is x equal to?” Pushkin, smiling, answered, “Zero!” “Good! In my class everything with you ends in zero. Go back to your seat and write verses.”12

Moreover, Pushkin’s reputation as a poet soon spread beyond the lycée. In 1814, at the age of fifteen, he published his first poem, and some thirty of his poems appeared in print during his school years.

While still in school, he also began to gain recognition from some of the literary lights of the time, including the grand old man of Russian poetry, ode writer to Catherine the Great, Gavriil Derzhavin.

So impressed was Derzhavin by the boy’s early poems that he told an acquaintance, “This is who will replace Derzhavin.”13 But not everyone who came in contact with Pushkin during these early years was convinced of his promising future, and one of the harshest

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criticisms of the young poet came from the director of the lycée, Egor Antonovich Engelhardt: Pushkin’s highest and ultimate aim is to shine, and precisely through poetry; but it will hardly find a solid foundation in him, because he fears all serious study, and his mind, having neither penetration nor depth, is a completely superficial, French mind. That is moreover the best that can be said of Pushkin. His heart is cold and empty; there is neither love nor religion in it; perhaps it is as empty as ever a youthful heart has been. Tender and youthful sensations are abased in him by an imagination defiled by all the erotic works of French literature.14

Engelhardt may have had a personal animus against Pushkin, however. Relations between the director and the student, who was precocious in affairs of the heart as well as in poetry, had apparently soured when Pushkin made untoward advances to a widow living with the Engelhardt family.

Upon his graduation from the lycée, Pushkin was awarded the rank of collegiate secretary in the civil service and received a position as a clerk in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This largely nominal appointment left him free to immerse himself in the social life of the capital, attending balls, frequenting the ballet and theater, and indulging in amorous escapades with actresses and dancers. He wrote to a friend in 1819: “Thank God, there’s plenty of champagne—and actresses as well—the one we drink, the other . . .”15 Pushkin’s enjoyment of the amusements that the imperial capital had to offer shaded over into his literary life. His growing reputation as a poet as well as his uncle Vasily’s connections gained him entrée into the foremost literary groupings of his day—Arzamas, into which he was accepted as a member while still a student at the lycée, and its successor, the Green Lamp. Coteries of this sort flourished

in Russia at the time. Literature, on the eve of the appearance of a new commercial audience, was still largely confined to such friendly associations, which explains the fondness for such intimate genres as verse epistles, epigrams, and verses written for ladies’ albums.16 The meetings of the societies to which Pushkin belonged seem to have combined literary discussions with drinking bouts and (at least in the case of the Green Lamp) political radicalism.

Despite all the distractions of Petersburg social and literary life, Pushkin continued writing poetry. At the beginning of April 1820 he completed his first long narrative poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, and gave a reading of it at the home of the noted poet and translator Vasily Zhukovsky. Zhukovsky was so taken with the new poem that he gave Pushkin a copy of his portrait with the inscription: “To the victorious pupil from the vanquished teacher.”17 Ruslan and Lyudmila is a light-hearted and largely parodic work in the tradition of the European and Russian mock epic. Throughout the poem Pushkin pokes fun at his sources, deflating the conventions of the fairy tale and sentimentalist poetry, particularly Zhukovsky’s maudlin “Lyudmila. A Russian Ballad,” from which his title character borrows her name. The prologue to the poem, which remains among the most beloved of Pushkin’s verses, was added only in the second edition, which came out in 1828. It opens on an oak tree standing on a curved seashore and goes on to describe a land filled with fantastic creatures, characters from Russian folklore and fairy tales. A “learned cat” walks back and forth along a golden chain wrapped around the oak, singing songs and telling stories, and in its final version Ruslan and Lyudmila becomes one of the cat’s tales.

Before he could enjoy his success and within weeks of the completion of the poem, Pushkin found himself under threat of exile to the Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea. For some time unpublished poems by Pushkin of a politically sensitive nature, notably Introduction

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his ode “Liberty,” had been circulating surreptitiously in Petersburg. Moreover, the young poet was fond of improvising epigrams directed at highly placed figures, including even the powerful Count Aleksei Arakcheev and Alexander I himself. By the spring of 1820 the situation had provoked the tsar to the point of taking action.

Only because of the intercession of the poet’s friends was Pushkin sent out of Petersburg not as a political exile but as a government servant, and not to the far north but to the south, to the chancellery of General Inzov in Ekaterinoslav.

Pushkin arrived in Ekaterinoslav in mid-May. His new superior was apparently inclined to view the poet’s past political indiscretions with indulgence and almost immediately granted him a leave of absence to travel with the family of General Nikolai Raevsky to take the waters in the Caucasus, and then to journey on with them to the Crimea. Pushkin became fast friends with Raevsky’s elder son, Aleksandr, who introduced him to the poetry of Byron, which was briefly to exert a powerful influence on Pushkin’s own writing.

Scholars have spent a good deal of effort trying to decide which of the general’s four daughters Pushkin fell in love with during their travels.18 What is certain is that Pushkin was fond of the whole family, and, as he wrote to his brother shortly thereafter, “I spent the happiest minutes of my life in the midst of the family of the honorable Raevsky.”19 By the time Pushkin rejoined General Inzov in September, his headquarters had been transferred to Kishinyov, the capital of Bessarabia. Pushkin remained there for almost three years, until he was finally allowed in July 1823 to transfer to the more cosmopolitan Odessa. There he was attached to the staff of the governor general of the region, Count Mikhail Vorontsov. Pushkin’s relations with his new superior degenerated soon enough, in part perhaps because of the incompatibility of their temperaments and in part because of Pushkin’s amorous pursuit of the count’s wife, with whom he may

have had an affair. In July 1824, Vorontsov, having intercepted a letter from Pushkin to a friend in which the poet wrote that he was “taking lessons in pure atheism,”20 used this evidence of impiety to secure Pushkin’s dismissal from the government service and the transfer of his place of exile to the family estate at Mikhailovskoe.

While in Kishinyov, Pushkin completed two very different narrative poems—The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Gabrieliad—and started another, The Robber Brothers, which he left unfinished. He also began what was to become his most famous work, the “novel in verse” Evgeny Onegin, shortly before his move to Odessa. In Odessa he completed the first two chapters of Onegin as well as a third narrative poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, and began writing a fourth, The Gypsies, which he finished only at Mikhailovskoe.

Among Pushkin’s “southern” poems The Gabrieliad stands alone as a throwback to the mock epics of the preceding century. It is a bawdy retelling of the Annunciation, which has Mary seduced by the snake and the angel Gabriel before giving herself to God, who comes to her in the shape of a dove. The blasphemous subject made the poem unpublishable in Pushkin’s lifetime, although it did circulate anonymously in manuscript.

Pushkin’s other long works from the period reflect his infatuation with and subsequent repudiation of European romanticism, especially Byron. The romantic settings and plots of the poems, in which themes of captivity and exile figure prominently, converge with Pushkin’s own situation. The protagonist of The Prisoner of the Caucasus is a nameless Russian taken captive by Circassian tribesmen. A Circassian maiden falls in love with him and eventually helps him escape. The Fountain of Bakhchisarai is based on the legend surrounding the “fountain of tears” at Bakhchisarai, which Pushkin visited in the company of the Raevskys. It recounts the tale of a Polish woman, Maria Potocka, who was abducted and held hostage by the khan of the Crimean Tartars, Girei. According to the legend, Introduction

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another of Girei’s wives, Zarema, murdered Maria out of jealousy over Girei’s love for her. The poem culminates not in the murder, which is left shrouded in innuendo, but in the dramatic confrontation between the two women from different cultures. In The Gypsies a disenchanted young Russian who has fled or been exiled from the north comes across a gypsy camp. He falls in love with a gypsy woman, Zemphira, and “marries” her, joining her and her father and the gypsy band in their travels. Soon enough, however, Zemphira tires of the romance and dallies with another man. Enraged, the Russian exile murders the lovers and is consequently expelled from the gypsy camp. In his concluding speech the old gypsy, Zemphira’s father, who is something of a “noble savage,” chastises the Russian for wanting freedom for himself while not knowing how to grant it to others. This ending has been read as Pushkin’s deflation of the conceit of the Byronic hero, and the poem as a whole certainly marks the end of Pushkin’s “Byronic” period.

Pushkin’s exile at Mikhailovskoe lasted slightly more than two years. When he first arrived at the estate in August 1824, his parents were there with his brother and sister, and initially the family reunion seemed happy enough. However, Pushkin’s father agreed to help the local authorities keep watch on his wayward son by opening his letters. This situation ultimately precipitated a violent argument, in the wake of which the family departed for Petersburg, leaving Pushkin alone. His primary source of companionship was his old nanny, Arina Rodionovna, and the Osipov family living at the neighboring estate of Trigorskoe: “My isolation is complete— idleness is triumphant. I have few neighbors nearby. I am acquainted with only one family and I see them fairly seldom. I spend the whole day on horseback, and in the evening I listen to the fairy tales of my nanny, the original of Tatyana’s nanny. I think you saw her once.

She is my only girlfriend—and only with her am I not bored.”21 He had at least one other “girlfriend, however: a niece of Praskovya

Osipova, Anna Petrovna Kern, who arrived for a visit at Trigorskoe in June 1825. Pushkin had met her briefly in Petersburg in 1819, and her reappearance in his life was the occasion for the writing of what is generally considered to be his greatest love poem, “To —” (“I remember a wondrous moment”), inspired by the memory of their first meeting.22 Relative isolation left Pushkin ample time for his writing, and during his stay at Mikhailovskoe he continued work on Evgeny Onegin and wrote the comic poem Count Nulin and the historical drama Boris Godunov. Both of the longer works Pushkin completed during his Mikhailovskoe exile bear, in very different ways, the imprint of the poet’s reading of Shakespeare. Count Nulin is a travesty of The Rape of Lucrece, in which the initial situation is turned upside down by the comic outcome. Nulin, whose name is derived from the Russian word for zero, is a modish young nobleman. While on his way to Petersburg, his carriage breaks down and he seeks shelter at a provincial estate. The mistress of the house, Natalya Pavlovna, a devotee of sentimental novels whose husband is away hunting, flirts with him over dinner, but indignantly rebuffs his advances when he sneaks into her room later the same night. The next day Natalya’s husband returns, and the chastened Nulin departs. True to the comic spirit of the poem, Pushkin leaves the reader with sly hints that Nulin may, during the night, have found consolation with Natalya’s maid and that the apparently virtuous Natalya may herself be having an affair with a neighbor.

Boris Godunov is closer in spirit to the Shakespearean historical dramas that inspired its loose scenic structure and eschewal of melodrama. The play draws on the persistent belief that Boris Godunov—who succeeded Tsar Fyodor, the last ruler in the Ryurik dynasty, and ruled Russia from 1598 to 1605—was responsible for the death of the likely successor to the throne, Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son, Dmitry. Pushkin portrays Godunov as a tragic figure Introduction

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haunted by his crimes. His hold on power is threatened by social unrest and challenged by the forces of the False Dmitry, supposedly a fugitive monk named Grigory Otrepev who claimed to be the tsarevich and did briefly succeed Godunov before himself being murdered in 1606.

Pushkin’s exile at Mikhailovskoe caused him—fortunately, it would seem—to miss one of the most famous events in Russian history. In the wake of the death of Alexander I, on December 14, 1825, a group of disillusioned army officers, with little or no popular support, staged what came to be known as the Decembrist revolt on Senate Square in Petersburg. The rebellion, along with hopes for the institution of a constitutional monarchy in Russia, was immediately quashed, and those who took part in it were harshly punished. Five of the ringleaders were hanged, and the others were imprisoned or sent into exile. Several of the insurrectionists were close friends of Pushkin, most notably his lycée classmates Kyukhelbeker and Pushchin, and he was acquainted with a number of others, including, by some accounts, all five who were executed.23 It was reported that poems by Pushkin were found among the papers of all of the arrested Decembrists, and Pushkin clearly had grounds for fearing that an attempt would be made to implicate him in the conspiracy. The investigation into the uprising eventually cleared the poet, however, or at least the new tsar, Nicholas I, decided that it would be politic to start his reign—clouded from the outset by rebellion—with a gesture of apparent tolerance. In the middle of the night of September 4, 1826, a special courier was sent to escort Pushkin to Pskov, whence he was sent on with a new escort to Moscow for a personal meeting with the tsar. One account, which purports to record Pushkin’s own words, gives the high points of the meeting: They took me, all covered with dirt, into the office of the emperor, who said to me, “Hello, Pushkin, are you glad to be back?” I answered

appropriately. The sovereign talked to me for a long time, then asked, “Pushkin would you have taken part in December 14, if you had been in Petersburg?”

“Without question, sovereign, all my friends were in the conspiracy, and I could not not have taken part in it. Only my absence from Petersburg saved me, for which I thank God!” “You have played the fool long enough,” the emperor retorted.

“I hope that now you will be reasonable, and we will quarrel no longer. You will send me everything that you write; henceforth I will be your censor.”24

This interview marked the end of Pushkin’s exile. His apparent reconciliation with the new tsar and the tsar’s offer to serve as his personal censor (freeing him from the ordinary censorship) seemed to promise a less constrained period in the poet’s life. As it turned out, however, Pushkin was to find himself in an increasingly complicated and ultimately unbearable position of powerlessness and dependency on the tsar. This was in part because, as the poet soon learned, he was to deal with Nicholas not so much directly as through his chief of gendarmes, Aleksandr Benkendorf. Ultimately he found his ability to publish and his freedom of movement even more constricted than before by this arrangement. He was now required to show all of his works to the tsar through Benkendorf before he could submit them for publication, and he had to request, again through Benkendorf, permission before he traveled anywhere.

Throughout much of 1827 and 1828 the poet found himself under investigation by the Third Section (the tsarist secret police), which Benkendorf headed, for works he had written years before: the lyric poem “André Chenier” (circulated among Decembrist sympathizers under the title “December 14”) and The Gabrieliad. After twice denying under interrogation his authorship of the latter poem, Pushkin only managed to put the matter to rest in October 1828 by Introduction

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writing a letter to Nicholas, the contents of which are unknown but in which he apparently admitted he had composed the poem and asked for clemency.

Pushkin’s difficulties with the authorities along with the distractions of the capital, to which he was returning after so many years of exile, took their toll on his writing. Yet if these years were not among Pushkin’s most productive, they did mark a significant shift in his literary concerns. The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, begun in 1827 and never completed, was Pushkin’s first attempt at prose.

The novel also evidenced Pushkin’s growing interest in the epoch of Peter the Great and particularly in the figure of Peter himself, to whom Pushkin would return in his works again and again.25 Peter the Great also appears as a character briefly, but memorably, in the only major work that Pushkin completed during this period, Poltava. The text of Poltava, which is the longest of Pushkin’s narrative poems, interweaves historical events and personal drama, playing out its central love intrigue against the background of Peter’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava.

Shortly after his return from exile, Pushkin made his first marriage proposal to a distant relative, who turned him down. Another young woman Pushkin seriously considered marrying, Anna Olenina, recorded in her diary a description of the poet: Having given him a singular genius, God did not reward him with an attractive exterior. His face was expressive of course, but a certain malice and sarcasm eclipsed the intelligence that could be seen in his blue, or rather, glassy eyes. The Negro profile he inherited from his mother’s line did not enhance his face. And add to that his terrible sidewhiskers, his disheveled hair, his nails long as claws, his short stature, his mincing manners, the insolent way he regarded the women whom he favored with his love, the strangeness of his natural and constrained disposition, and his unlimited vanity—these are

all the merits, bodily and spiritual, that high society attributed to the Russian poet of the nineteenth century.

People also said that he is a bad son, but it is impossible to know everything in family matters; that he is a dissolute man, but then all the young men of the time are almost the same.26

Appearance and morals aside, Pushkin was a less than desirable suitor despite his renown as a poet because of his reputation as a political scapegrace and his relatively meager and unstable income.

Olenina later claimed that she did not marry Pushkin “because he had no position in society, and because he was poor.”27 Pushkin first met the woman who ultimately did become his wife, Natalya Nikolaevna Goncharova, at a ball in December 1828.

He became smitten with the sixteen-year-old beauty almost immediately and proposed in the late spring. Given his precarious financial and social position, Pushkin was pleased when he was put off rather than turned down. He left Moscow on May 1, 1829, to visit his brother, Lev, who was on active service with the Russian army in the Caucasus. On his way south Pushkin visited the retired general Aleksei Ermolov in Oryol, and then followed the Russian troops fighting the Turks under the command of General Ivan Paskevich into the Turkish town of Erzurum. Pushkin over and over requested permission from the tsar to travel abroad, always unsuccessfully, and this trip was the closest he ever came to leaving Russia. In his travel sketch Journey to Erzurum he described his first sight of the Turkish border: “To me the border had something mysterious about it; since childhood my fondest dream had been to travel. For a long time thereafter I led a nomadic life, wandering now to the south, now to the north, and I had not yet escaped from the boundaries of immense Russia. I gaily rode into the cherished river, and the kindly horse carried me to the Turkish bank. But that bank had already been taken; I was still in Russia.”28 Introduction

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When Pushkin returned to Moscow, his suit was once again rebuffed by Goncharova’s mother, who apparently hoped that her daughter could make a better match. By the spring of 1830, however, when no other suitors had materialized, Pushkin’s proposal was accepted, and the engagement went forward, although negotiations between Pushkin and his future in-laws over finances kept the arrangement rocky almost up to the wedding.

In the midst of trying to reach an agreement with the relations of his dowerless bride, Pushkin left at the end of August for the family estate at Boldino. He had planned to stay there only a month, but a quarantine against a cholera epidemic kept him in the country until the beginning of December. This forced isolation resulted in one of the most productive periods of his career, and during this “first Boldino autumn” he completed Evgeny Onegin and all four of his “little tragedies,” as well as writing The Tales of Belkin and some thirty short poems.

Evgeny Onegin, which Pushkin wrote over a period of eight years, is his signature work. The plot of the novel is flimsy. The title character is a young Petersburg dandy who goes to the country to tend to his dying rich uncle. While there, he becomes friendly with a sentimental young poet, Vladimir Lensky, who introduces him to the family of his fiancée, Olga Larina. Olga’s sister, Tatyana, becomes infatuated with Onegin and writes him a letter confessing her feelings. Onegin responds coldly to Tatyana’s naive outpouring of affection and in a fit of pique provokes Lensky’s jealousy by flirting with Olga. The poet challenges Onegin to a duel and is killed.

Sometime later Onegin again meets Tatyana, who in the interim has married and become an elegant arbiter of Petersburg fashion.

Now Onegin is lovestruck, but when he in his turn writes a letter to Tatyana professing his love, she spurns him, citing her wifely duty and reproaching him for his earlier insensitivity. The schematically symmetrical plot at times seems little more than an excuse

for the “idle chatter” of Pushkin’s garrulous narrator, who continually leaves the action hanging to hold forth on everything from the weather to metapoetics.

The virtuoso interplay of classically symmetrical plot and deceptively careless digressions finds its match in the intricate stanzaic form sustained throughout Evgeny Onegin. The structure and effect of this variant on the traditional sonnet, which was created by Pushkin and has come to be known as the Onegin stanza, was most memorably described by Vladimir Nabokov in his introduction to his translation of the poem. Nabokov compared the Onegin stanza to the “spin of a top,” the “patterns” showing clearly in the opening lines, blurring during the “main spinning process” in the central lines, and reappearing with stunning effectiveness in the concluding couplet.29 The comic narrative poem, The Little House at Kolomna, shares with Evgeny Onegin such features as a talkative narrator and slim reliance on plot. The poem revolves coyly around the suggestive situation of a hussar who, disguised as a female cook, moves into the house where a maiden named Parasha lives with her mother. The mother, suspecting that their new servant plans to rob them while they are out, rushes home from church to find the “cook” shaving.

Pushkin ends his poem with a “moral”: It’s dangerous to hire a cook for free; It is strange and futile for one who was born a man To dress up in a skirt; Sometime he will have to shave, Which is incompatible With a woman’s nature. . . . Nothing more Will you squeeze out of my story.30

In contrast, the dramatic scenes known as the “little tragedies” are masterpieces of verbal economy, concentrated explorations of Introduction

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extremes of human psychology. The Covetous Knight portrays the confrontation between a miserly baron, who hoards his riches and dreams of returning from the grave “like a watchful shade to sit on my trunk and guard my treasure from the living,”31 and his resentful son. Mozart and Salieri, based on the rumor that Mozart was poisoned by the Italian composer Antonio Salieri out of jealousy, explores the proposition that genius and villainy are incompatible. The Stone Guest, the longest of the “little tragedies,” is Pushkin’s version of the Don Juan story. Feast in Time of Plague is a close translation of an excerpt from John Wilson’s The City of the Plague.

Pushkin’s rendition, however, rises above the original, focusing the emotional intensity of the revels of the characters in the city ravaged by disease and death.

In the Belkin tales Pushkin again tried his hand at prose. The five short stories of the collection are attributed to “the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin,” who is represented in the publisher’s preface—playfully signed A. P.—as a provincial landowner who for “lack of imagination” recorded stories related to him by others. The five stories differ markedly from one another, ranging from fantasy and comic farce to muted pathos, and are only loosely bound together by narrative structure and recurring leitmotifs.

Pushkin at last married Natalya Goncharova on February 18, 1831.

The marriage between the teenaged beauty and the poet had all the earmarks of a mismatch, and Pushkin himself seems to have had few illusions, as revealed in a letter he wrote shortly before the wedding: I am married—or almost. I have already thought over everything that you could say in defense of the bachelor life and against marriage. I have cold-bloodedly weighed the advantages and disadvantages of the state I have chosen. My youth passed tumultuously and fruitlessly. Up until now I have lived differently from the way people usually live. I have not been happy. Il n’est de bonheur que dans les

voies communes. I am over thirty. At thirty people usually marry—I am acting as people do and will probably not regret it. Moreover, I am marrying without rapture, without juvenile infatuation. The future does not appear rosy to me, but in its complete nakedness.

Sorrows will not surprise me: they are included in my domestic budget—Any joy will be unexpected.32

As it turned out, Pushkin’s assessment was, if anything, overly optimistic. The marriage exacerbated problems in Pushkin’s life that had predated it, most obviously the poet’s increasingly complex relationship with the tsar. Goncharova’s success in high society made her an asset in court circles, which is where Nicholas I was determined to keep her. To that end the tsar granted Pushkin a nominal post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including a modest yearly salary and the right to work in archives. Then on the last day of 1833 Nicholas conferred on Pushkin the title of Kammerjunker, a position that made it possible for Goncharova to attend court functions with Pushkin as her escort. This “honor” was particularly irksome to the status-conscious poet, because the rank was generally granted to much younger men. Pushkin commented on the subject in his diary, perhaps with more moderation than he actually felt: “People ask me if I am satisfied to have been made a Kammerjunker. I am, because the sovereign intended to honor me, not to humiliate me.”33 Although he received a salary and commanded extraordinary royalties for his writings by the standards of the time, Pushkin’s income was far from sufficient to sustain the expenditures necessitated by his wife’s social activities—not to mention his own gambling. His literary earnings were particularly unreliable since they depended not only on what he was able to write, but also on what the tsar and Benkendorf would allow him to publish. On occasion he was forced to go to Nicholas to plead for large loans from the state, which only deepened his galling dependency on the ruler.

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During the last years of the poet’s life, the situation became so dire that Pushkin was periodically reduced to pawning family valuables.

Twice he took serious measures to extricate himself from the worsening situation. In the summer of 1834, he requested official permission to resign his government post. Benkendorf communicated to him that his resignation would be accepted but he would lose access to the archives he needed for his historical research, so Pushkin withdrew his request. On June 1 of the next year, the poet made a final attempt to retire at least temporarily from the financially ruinous Petersburg social life. He wrote to Benkendorf: “I find myself in need of curtailing expenditures that only lead me into debt and are preparing for me a future of anxiety and worries, if not of destitution and despair. Three or four years of retirement in the country would make it possible for me to return to Petersburg and take up again the pursuits for which I am still indebted to the benevolence of His Majesty.”34 This time he was simply refused.

The problems that dogged Pushkin’s life after marriage emanated, at least in part, from the ambiguity of his position as a writer at a time when literary institutions were in a period of transition. The old system of court patronage, of which Pushkin’s tortured relationship with Nicholas I may perhaps be seen as a vestige, was giving way to a new professionalism among writers and a new commercialism among publishers seeking to appeal to a growing readership. The ascendancy of the intimate salon culture of the “gentleman poets” was coming to an end as poetry ceded to prose as the dominant literary form. Though Pushkin may have been Russia’s first “professional” writer—that is, the first writer to depend largely on the income derived from his literary works for his livelihood—he was also, ironically, the first victim of these changes. His contemporaries increasingly saw him as a literary dinosaur, an aristocrat, and already in the late 1820s his literary reputation began to decline. Thus, Vissarion Belinsky, who was to become Russia’s most influential critic,

wrote in his first large article in 1834: “Pushkin reigned for ten years: Boris Godunov was his last great feat; in the third part of the complete collection of his poems the sounds of his harmonious lyre have died away. Now we do not recognize Pushkin: he has died, or, perhaps, only lost consciousness for a time.”35 Belinsky’s report of the poet’s death as a writer was premature— Pushkin wrote some of what were to become his most famous works in the last years of his life. But the poet was having an ever more difficult time writing. Even before his marriage he had developed a pattern of fleeing Petersburg for the country to write and had conceived an almost superstitious belief in autumn as the season when he was visited by intense bursts of creativity. As we have seen, however, it was becoming harder and harder for Pushkin to get away from Petersburg. Nonetheless in 1833 he received permission from the tsar to travel for the purpose of pursuing his historical research, and in September he visited the area of the Urals that had been the site of the Pugachov rebellion under Catherine the Great. Pugachov, a Don Cossack who claimed to be Catherine’s dead husband, Peter III, had in the autumn of 1773 amassed a force of some thirty thousand of Russia’s dispossessed and disenchanted and managed to capture a number of large cities before he was apprehended by government forces and executed. Pushkin traveled to the centers of the revolt, Orenburg and Kazan, as well as to other towns, interviewing eyewitnesses to the insurrection. He then spent the month of October at Boldino, where he completed his History of Pugachov and wrote several poetic works, most notably The Bronze Horseman.

This “second Boldino autumn” was to be the last of Pushkin’s productive periods. An attempt to seek inspiration yet again at Boldino the following year ended in failure, and he was never to find another chance to return there to write.

The Bronze Horseman is considered by many to be Pushkin’s masterpiece. It relates the story of a petty clerk named Evgeny whose Introduction

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fiancée, Parasha, dies during the Petersburg flood of 1824. Evgeny’s mind is unhinged by the incident and he wanders the city in a daze for a year. One night, when the foul weather recalls the flood, he finds himself on the square where the Bronze Horseman, the famous Falconet statue of Peter the Great on a rearing horse, stands.

Blaming his misfortunes on Peter, who founded the city, Evgeny confronts the statue, which comes alive and chases the poor man through the streets of Petersburg. The poem ends with Evgeny lying dead on the ruins of Parasha’s house. The Bronze Horseman occupies a central place among Pushkin’s works and in the Russian literary tradition not only because of the brilliance of its poetry. It gave literary form to fundamental tensions of Russian culture, most notably the drama of confrontation between the individual and the state.

Because of the tsar’s objections, the poem could not be published in Pushkin’s lifetime and in fact did not appear in print in its original form until the twentieth century.

“The Queen of Spades” was also, most likely, a product of the second Boldino autumn. In the story (which differs significantly from Tchaikovsky’s opera) the central character, a russified German named Hermann, learns that an elderly countess holds the secret to three successive winning cards. When the countess refuses to divulge it, Hermann threatens her with a revolver, and she dies of fright. Several days later, she appears to him in a dream and tells him to play the three, the seven, and the ace. Hermann wins with the three and the seven, but when he plays the ace, the queen of spades is dealt to him instead. On the card, in place of the queen of spades, he sees the face of the old countess and goes mad.

Perhaps the brightest moment in the waning years of Pushkin’s life came when in January 1836 the poet was granted permission to publish a quarterly journal, the Contemporary. For almost a decade Pushkin had nursed the desire to edit his own periodical but had been repeatedly refused permission. The Contemporary was

unquestionably the finest literary periodical of its day, printing works by virtually every major Russian writer of the time. Among his own works that appeared in the Contemporary, Pushkin published his only completed prose novel, The Captain’s Daughter. It is a fictionalized account of the Pugachov rebellion, centering around the narrator, a young officer named Grinyov, who meets Pugachov when the rebel leader is nothing more than a drunken tramp, and gives him a rabbitskin coat. This act of charity later prompts Pugachov, after his forces have seized the garrison in which Grinyov is serving, to spare his former benefactor’s life. In the manner of Sir Walter Scott, historical events and personages—including Catherine the Great in house dress—are interwoven with the tale of Grinyov’s life and love for the daughter of his superior officer. Despite the high literary quality of this and other works published in the Contemporary, the journal was not a commercial success (although it was to survive its founder by many decades) and did nothing to ease Pushkin’s financial distress.

By 1836 Pushkin’s situation was becoming intolerable. Aside from his mounting debts, his problems with Benkendorf and the tsar, and his waning literary fortunes, rumors had begun to circulate about the flirtation between his wife and a young cavalry officer, Georges d’Anthès, a French émigré and the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador, Baron van Heeckeren. Early in November Pushkin received, through unsuspecting friends, copies of an anonymous letter hinting transparently at a liaison between the poet’s wife and the tsar.

Either because he thought van Heeckeren was responsible for the letter or because he could not get at the tsar, Pushkin responded by challenging d’Anthès to a duel. Only after tense negotiations and an agreement that the Frenchman would marry Pushkin’s sister-inlaw, Ekaterina Goncharova, was the poet persuaded to back down.

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d’Anthès from public demonstrations of his attraction to his sisterin-law. Pushkin sent van Heeckeren a letter so insulting that it left d’Anthès no alternative but to issue a challenge, and the duel took place the next day, January 27. D’Anthès shot first, mortally wounding Pushkin, but the poet still managed to get off a shot. He hit his opponent but, as it turned out, the wound was not serious.

Pushkin died two days later in his apartment on the Moika Canal in Petersburg. One commentator, perhaps somewhat hyperbolic ally, marked an immediate change in public opinion about Pushkin: “All of Petersburg began to talk about Pushkin’s death, and the unfavorable opinion of him was immediately replaced by the most sincere enthusiasm: everyone turned to the bookshops—to buy the new miniature edition of Onegin that had just come out: more than two thousand copies were sold in three days.”36 Pushkin’s death prompted an unexpected public outpouring of emotion and served as a focus for the manifestation of deepseated cultural rifts and allegiances. News of the poet’s demise drew crowds of people to pay their final respects. A Prussian envoy even reported to his government that “as many as fifty thousand persons of all estates” viewed the body while it still lay in the Pushkin home.37 Though that figure is most likely exaggerated, the mood of the public gave the authorities cause for concern, and measures were taken to prevent the situation from turning into an “indecent tableau of triumph of the liberals.”38 The body was carried out of Pushkin’s home under police escort at midnight on the night of January 30–31 and taken to the Equerry’s Church instead of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, where the funeral was supposed to have been held. Despite the change of venue, there were crowds again in the church and on the square outside during the funeral on February 1.

The emotional pitch of some of the mourners seems to have given rise to less than decorous behavior: “Respect for the memory of the poet in the huge crowds of common people, who were at his funeral

service at the Equerry’s Church, was so great that all the flaps of Pushkin’s frock coat were torn to shreds, and he was left lying in little more than his jacket; his sidewhiskers and the hair on his head were carefully cut off by his lady admirers.”39 Pushkin’s body was spirited out of Petersburg, again by the police in the middle of the night, and buried quietly with none of the poet’s family and only a handful of his friends in attendance, at the Svyatogorsk Monastery near Mikhailovskoe on February 5.

The authorities also felt it prudent to keep a tight rein on newspaper accounts of the poet’s death, and at least two papers were chastised for running brief notices acknowledging the poet’s importance. The following obituary ran surrounded by a black border in the Literary Supplement to the Russian Invalid: The sun of our poetry has set! Pushkin has passed away, passed away in the flower of years, in the middle of his great pursuit! . . . We have no strength to say any more about this, and it is not necessary; every Russian heart knows the whole cost of this irreparable loss and every Russian heart will be torn to pieces. Pushkin! Our poet! Our joy, our national glory! . . . Can it really be that we no longer have Pushkin! It is impossible to become accustomed to this thought!40

The editor of the newspaper, Andrei Kraevsky, was called before the president of the censorship committee, who had been delegated to convey to him the displeasure of Sergei Uvarov, the minister of education: Why is there a black border around the news of the death of a person who held no rank, who occupied no position in the state service? But that is nothing! What expressions! “The sun of poetry!!”

Good gracious, such honor for what? “Pushkin passed away . . . in the middle of his great pursuit!” What pursuit? Sergei Semyonovich Introduction

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[Uvarov] precisely remarked: was Pushkin a general, a military leader, a minister, a statesman?! Finally, he died at almost forty!

Writing verses does not mean, as Sergei Semyonovich expressed it, engaging in a great pursuit!41

Ironically, the figure of Pushkin, fetishized in the collective memory, would ultimately overshadow “military leaders” and “statesmen” as a cultural hero for the Russian nation, putting down deep roots in the Russian consciousness and surviving the collapse of ruler cults and political systems.

ɷɸɷ It would be difficult to overestimate the spate and significance of the myriad associations that have accrued to the figure of Pushkin in the culture of his native land during the century and a half since his death. Pushkin has served as a touchstone for definitions of national identity and of the function of literature in society and has been coopted by virtually every ideology or faction that has had any voice in Russian and Soviet political, intellectual, or artistic life.42 The basic terms of the Pushkin myth were set during the poet’s lifetime and in the years immediately following his death. Nikolai Gogol was among the first to herald Pushkin as Russia’s “national poet,” in his 1834 article “Some Words About Pushkin.” The essay begins: Pushkin’s name immediately calls to mind the thought of a Russian national poet. In fact, none of our poets is superior to him or could be called more national; this right decisively belongs to him. In his works, as if in a dictionary, are contained all the wealth, strength, and flexibility of our language. More and farther than anyone else, he extended its boundaries and revealed its full expanse.

Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and perhaps the only manifestation of the Russian spirit; this is the Russian in his development, as he perhaps will appear in two hundred years. In him the Russian nature, the Russian soul, the Russian language, the Russian character are reflected with the same purity, the same purified beauty in which a landscape is reflected on the convex surface of an optical glass.

His very life is absolutely Russian.43

Pushkin—both in his works and in his life—becomes the quintessential expression of Russianness, an apex of development that the average Russian will not reach until far in the future. Gogol maintains that even in the early works—many of which are set among non-Russian peoples—Pushkin is “Russian,” for he serves as the “voice” of the Russian people: “He was from the very beginning national, because true nationality consists not in the description of sarafans but in the very spirit of the people. A poet can be national even when he is describing a completely foreign world, but looks at it through the eyes of his national element, with the eyes of the whole people, when he feels and speaks in such a way that it seems to his fellow countrymen as if they were feeling and saying it themselves.”44 Gogol’s insistence that Pushkin, as an expression of the national spirit, can even appropriate the foreign, and his equation of Pushkin with a Russianness that transcends social and economic divisions, ultimately became the cornerstone of the Pushkin myth.

Pushkin’s premature death added a new and compelling dimension to the premises of the myth outlined by Gogol. The circumstances surrounding the duel and its fatal outcome were tailor-made to unleash the mythopoeic forces latent in Russian culture, and they have continued to exercise the Russian imagination—sometimes, it seems, more than Pushkin’s poems themselves have—in the century and a half that has elapsed since the event.

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Aside from the popular response to the poet’s death—the crowds that flocked to pay their last respects and buy up the poet’s works—there came poetic responses as well. Virtually every prominent poet of the day produced verses on the significance of Pushkin’s demise. The most famous of these poems—and the poetic interpretation that most immediately grabbed the educated public’s imagination—was Mikhail Lermontov’s “Death of a Poet,” copies of which circulated in Petersburg in the days following Pushkin’s death. In it Lermontov portrays Pushkin as a victim of high society intrigue and makes the most of d’Anthès’ foreign origin: From afar Like hundreds of refugees, In pursuit of fortune and status He was tossed here by the will of fate; Laughing, he boldly scorned The language and customs of a foreign country; He could not spare us our glory; He could not understand in that bloody moment What he had raised his hand against!45

The presumed alliance between d’Anthès and the court of Nicholas casts Pushkin’s death as a mythic conflict between “us” and “them,” between Russia’s glory and the menacing otherness of the Europeanized upper classes. By the same token Lermontov and other poets who wrote poems commemorating Pushkin’s death drew on hagiographic motifs to portray the poet as an innocent victim who went willingly to his death as a blood sacrifice to purge Russia’s ills, thereby endowing Pushkin with an aura of religious martyrdom.46 “Death of a Poet” catapulted Lermontov from relative obscurity to notoriety, marking him as Pushkin’s successor.47 Henceforth

virtually every major Russian writer and literary critic would have to define himself in relation to Pushkin. Even Gogol, in his “Author’s Confession,” written shortly before his death in 1852, pointed to Pushkin’s encouragement of his literary career to validate his calling as a writer: “Perhaps, with the years and with the need to amuse myself this exuberance would have disappeared and with it my writing career. But Pushkin forced me to look at the business seriously. . . . He gave me his own plot, out of which he wanted to make something on the order of a long poem and which, he claimed, he would not have given to anyone else. This was the plot of Dead Souls. (The idea for The Inspector General also belongs to him.)”48 Pushkin had become the founding father of the dynastic line of Russian literature from which, ultimately, future writers and even literary traditions would draw their legitimacy.

Though all of the attributes of the Pushkin cult can be traced back to the time of the poet’s life and death, it was only much later in the century that a forum for the myth capable of capturing the popular consciousness would be found. A massive retrospective in eleven articles written by Belinsky between 1843 and 1846 reflects a certain ambivalence about Pushkin’s stature that was perhaps inevitable so close upon the poet’s death. Belinsky here modified his earlier view and recognized Pushkin’s greatness as an artist and the significance of his historical role: “Pushkin’s vocation was to be the first poet-artist of Russia, to give it poetry as art.”49 Yet he was reluctant to follow Gogol in conferring on Pushkin the status of national poet on a par with other great writers of the world, arguing that Russia had not reached a level of development where it could produce a writer of the first rank. In the course of his argument Belinsky originated much of the stock in trade of later Pushkin studies, including the claim that Evgeny Onegin was a “picture that was true to the reality of Russian society in a certain epoch.”50 But this strength, the faithful depiction of reality, was also the work’s weakness, Belinsky Introduction

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maintained, for Evgeny Onegin had already been bypassed by Russian society and appeared dated. By the same token, while concluding his series of articles with the affirmation that Pushkin would in the future be considered a “classic” in Russia, Belinsky essentially relegated him to the past.

It was not until a new edition of Pushkin’s works began to appear in 1855—coincidentally, upon the death of Nicholas I and the end of his repressive reign—that Pushkin’s achievement and heritage were seriously reconsidered. The ensuing debate, which continued for ten years, pitted the “radical” critics, who claimed to be direct heirs of the Belinskian tradition of socially committed criticism, against a varied group of critics lumped together under the somewhat inaccurate label “aesthetes.” In this polemic Pushkin was to some extent a pawn in a larger debate about the role of literature in society. While the aesthetes attempted to rehabilitate Pushkin’s literary reputation by adopting him as a champion of the independence of art from political demands, their opponents countered with a utilitarian view of literature that subordinated art to social conscience and even questioned the value of art in society. The most extreme of Pushkin’s detractors, the “nihilist” critic Dmitry Pisarev, claimed that Pushkin was no more than a “parody of a poet,” whose place “is not on the writing desk of a contemporary worker, but in the dusty study of an antique collector, next to the rusty armor and broken harquebuses.” Pisarev scathingly dismissed Evgeny Onegin as “nothing other than a vivid and brilliant apotheosis of the dreariest and most senseless status quo,”51 to be swept aside to make way for a better Russia. For a time Pisarev seemed to have the final word, and once again discussion of Pushkin receded from the center- stage of cultural debate.

The turning point for Pushkin as a cultural icon came in 1880 with the unveiling of the now-famous statue of Pushkin by the sculptor A.M. Opekushin on one of Moscow’s central streets.52

The subscription drive to raise the funds for the statue—the first monument to a literary figure to be placed in a prominent location in any Russian city—dragged on for some two decades; the ceremonies surrounding the unveiling, perhaps the most ambitious private cultural enterprise ever undertaken in tsarist Russia, seemed at risk of falling apart almost until the last minute. But when the festivities did in fact come off, the response from the public and the popular press was beyond anything that could have been expected.

The high point of the events was not the unveiling ceremony itself but the speech in honor of Pushkin delivered by Dostoevsky on the final day of the proceedings.53 Dostoevsky, setting off from the vision of Pushkin outlined in Gogol’s 1834 remarks,54 went on to place him not on a par with but actually above the other great writers of the world: No, I state categorically that never has there been a poet with such a universal responsiveness as Pushkin. It is not only a matter of his responsiveness but also of its amazing depth, the reincarnation in his spirit of the spirit of foreign peoples, a reincarnation that is almost total and is therefore miraculous. Never has this phenomenon been repeated in any poet in the whole world. This we find in Pushkin alone, and in this sense, I repeat, he is a unique and unprecedented phenomenon, and, as far as we are concerned, a prophetic one . . . for it is precisely in this that his national, Russian strength was most fully expressed, in the national spirit of his poetry, the national spirit in its future development, the national spirit of our future, which is already concealed in the present and is expressed prophetically. For what is the strength of the Russian national spirit if not its striving, in its ultimate goals, for universality and common humanity? Having become fully a national poet, Pushkin immediately, as soon as he came in contact with the strength of the people, began to sense their great future vocation. In this he was a diviner and a prophet.55 Introduction

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It is therefore precisely Pushkin’s ability to reincarnate himself in other nationalities that becomes a gauge of his Russianness, for the Russian spirit is defined by its aspiration toward universality: “To become a true Russian, to become completely Russian, perhaps, means only . . . to become a brother to all people, to become a universal man, if you will.”56 This conception of Russianness, of which Pushkin becomes a prophetic emblem, defines Russia’s messianic mission in European history, which is “to strive to reconcile European conflicts once and for all, to show the way out of European ennui in our universally human and unifying Russian soul, to find room in it with brotherly love for all our brothers, and finally, perhaps, to utter the ultimate word of great, universal harmony, of ultimate brotherly accord between all tribes according to the law of Christ’s Gospel!”57 In the ecstatic rhetoric of Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech all the elements of the Pushkin myth finally come together in an affirmation, legitimized by Pushkin, of the Russian nation’s superiority to other nations. The wild enthusiasm with which Dostoevsky’s words were greeted—especially as compared to the relatively subdued response to Turgenev’s more measured and highbrow speech the preceding day—suggests that Dostoevsky was the first to tap the full potential of Pushkin as a cultural icon. By the 1899 centenary celebration of Pushkin’s birth, both the tsarist government and the growing commercial sector of Russian society had recognized the value of Pushkin’s name.58 The authorities mobilized the vast bureaucratic structures at their disposal to take Pushkin—or at least a carefully orchestrated official version of Pushkin—to “virtually every corner of the empire.”59 The Pushkin of 1899 was, hardly surprisingly, presented as an apologist for autocracy and an obedient subject of the tsar, his biography sanitized and his works carefully screened for those that were most appropriate for presentation to “the masses.” Copies of Pushkin’s works as well as candy bars with

Pushkin’s image imprinted on them were passed out to schoolchildren, and enterprising businessmen produced “a spate of Pushkin products, which included Pushkin cigarettes, tobacco, rolling papers, matches, candy, steel pens, stationery, ink stands, liqueur, knives, watches, vases, cups, shoes, dresses, lamps, fans, perfume (“Bouquet Pouchkine”), a variety of portraits and postcards, plus a board game (“Pushkin’s Duel,” which was roundly criticized in the press as being in thoroughly bad taste).”60 The co-opting of Pushkin by the government and the growing mass readership did not sit well with the intelligentsia. Whereas representatives of the literary elite had dominated the 1880 Pushkin celebration—termed a “holiday of the Russian intelligentsia”—not a single major writer agreed to participate in the 1899 festivities.

The “vulgarization” of Pushkin prompted a countermovement to reclaim him by the literary avant-garde, at the time under the sway of Symbolism. This trend gave a tremendous impetus to serious Pushkin scholarship, and some of the major poets of the Symbolist movement, notably Valery Bryusov, contributed textological studies that recovered some of Pushkin’s most significant works from the distortions perpetrated on them by the censorship and by well-meaning friends of the poet who posthumously “cleaned up” his works to get them into print. At the same time, the Symbolists responded to the “massification” and “politicization” of Pushkin by attempting to mold him to their own vision of the artistic process.

Certainly, it was nothing new for literary (and literary cum political) critics to use Pushkin as a symbolic touchstone for their own theories of art (or of the derivative or secondary nature of art in society).

A new development, however, was the impulse for writers, especially poets, to define themselves by creating personalized Pushkins—“my Pushkin”61—and to incorporate echoes of Pushkin’s poetry and poetics as a sort of esoteric code into their own aggressively high-culture works unapologetically aimed at a narrow, intimate, exceptionally Introduction

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well educated audience of poet-readers. This diversification of Pushkin reflected the diversification of Russian culture itself as well as the appearance of competing claims for the powerful force of legitimization that had become embodied in the Pushkin myth.

At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the Russian Futurists, simultaneously challenging the Symbolists’ hegemony over high culture and the official canonization of the nineteenthcentury classics, launched an attack that was reminiscent of Pisarev’s nihilist condemnation of Pushkin a half century before. In their 1912 manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” the Futurists rejected the Russian classical heritage as outmoded: “The past is constricting. The Academy and Pushkin are more incomprehensible than hieroglyphs. Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and etc. and etc. from the Steamship of contemporaneity.” They demanded that the right of the poet “to an insurmountable hatred for all language that existed before him” be respected.62 This radical repudiation of the culture of the past was a harbinger of the power struggle over how to define the newly emerging Soviet culture in relation to the past—and who was to define it—that shaped Bolshevik cultural policy during the first two decades after the Revolution.

In the wake of the Revolution the central terms of the debate over culture were redefined to focus on the issue of the creation of a proletarian culture. Should a distinctly proletarian culture be encouraged to develop and, if so, should it build on the cultural achievements of the past? In this struggle between “iconoclasts” and “preservers”63 the Futurists, with the flamboyant Vladimir Mayakovsky in the lead, continued to be the most raucous spokesmen for the need to jettison the past and begin anew. At the other end of the spectrum, Bolshevik political leaders—Lenin first and foremost— tended to be more conservative in their tastes and inclined to mobilize prerevolutionary high culture as a source of legitimacy for the newly emerging Soviet culture.

In this context, the seemingly anomalous celebration of the eighty- fourth anniversary of Pushkin’s death held on February 14, 1921, at the House of Writers in Petrograd stands out as a particularly poignant moment.64 In his remarks on that occasion, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich clearly defined this off-year celebration of the poet’s death as a sorrowful farewell to the old world of the Russian intelligentsia and its culture as embodied in Pushkin: “The former Russia, and therefore Pushkin’s Russia, immediately and sharply moved away from us by an immeasurably greater distance than it would have moved away from us during the same period given an evolutionary movement of events. The Petrine and Petersburg period in Russian history has ended; no matter what stands ahead—the old will not return. A return is unthinkable both historically and psychologically.”65 Khodasevich went on to foresee the coming of a second “eclipse of the Pushkinian sun”66 (the first having been during the era of Pisarev) and concluded his speech on a note of dark foreboding: That heightened interest in the poet that many have sensed in recent years arose, perhaps, out of a premonition, out of a pressing need: in part—to make sense of Pushkin before it was too late, before the link with his time was lost completely, in part—as a passionate desire to feel his nearness one more time, because we are living through the last hours of this nearness before parting. And our desire to make the day of Pushkin’s death a day of universal celebration, partly, it seems to me, is prompted by this same premonition: we are coming to an agreement about by what name we are to hail one another in the darkness that is falling on us.67

Even as he symbolically bid farewell, Khodasevich suggested—prophetically, as it turned out—that Pushkin would remain a rallying point for the values of the intelligentsia in the years ahead.

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Yet if it fell to Khodasevich on this occasion to pronounce the last rites over the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, it was Aleksandr Blok—cast by many of his contemporaries as the true heir to Pushkin’s legacy—who spoke “on the calling of the poet” (as the speech was titled). Yet despite the ostensibly abstract nature of his speech, Blok’s remarks, no less than Khodasevich’s, used Pushkin to address the realities of his own time. Blok began by contrasting Pushkin to those who wield political and military power: Our memory preserves from infancy the cheerful name: Pushkin.

This name, this sound fills up many days of our lives. The gloomy names of emperors, generals, inventors of weapons of murder, the torturers and martyrs of life. And next to them—this light name: Pushkin.

Pushkin was able to carry his creative burden lightly and cheerfully despite the fact that the role of the poet is neither light nor cheerful; it is tragic. 68

Blok argued that the poet’s role was to bring harmony into the world out of the elemental chaos of being. He maintained that the internal part of the poet’s labor could not be hindered by the outside world, but the final phase, when the poet’s creations enter the world, put the poet at the mercy of the “rabble” (drawing his terms from Pushkin’s 1828 lyric poem “The Poet and the Crowd”), “for whom a stove pot is more valuable than a god.” Blok was careful to point out that the “rabble” were not the “common people” but “the court aristocracy, of which nothing remained in place of a soul except titles of nobility; but already before Pushkin’s eyes the place of the hereditary aristocracy was rapidly being occupied by the bureaucracy.

These clerks are our rabble as well.”69 Laying the guilt for Pushkin’s tragic end squarely on the bureaucracy and censorship, Blok delivered a dark warning to the forces ranged against culture in the

young Bolshevik state: “And it was no5t d’Anthès’s bullet that killed Pushkin. He was killed by the absence of air. His culture died with him.”70 By a strange twist of fate, Blok, like Dostoevsky before him, survived his Pushkin speech by only a matter of months. As his last major public statement before his death and in the light of events to come, his remarks all the more profoundly entered the realm of the myth of the poet surrounding Pushkin as an epitaph to the spirit of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia.

This nostalgic and apprehensive gathering of intellectuals in Petrograd in 1921 stands in grim contrast to the 1937 jubilee marking the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Pushkin’s death, which was the first major official commemoration of a Pushkin anniversary in the Soviet period. Symbolically, the year-long festivities consecrated the victory of conservative forces over iconoclasts in Soviet culture through a ritual recanonization of Pushkin as the founder of the dynastic line of Russian classical literature that had now been rechristened the line of succession leading directly to Soviet culture.

There was a macabre irony in that these extravagant celebrations of Pushkin’s death took place at the height of the Stalin purges, a coincidence that was rather too appropriately marked by the unveiling of a monument to the poet on February 8, the anniversary of Pushkin’s duel with d’Anthès, in Leningrad on the site of that fatal confrontation.

The jubilee was an inverted mirror image of the 1899 tsarist celebration of the poet’s birth, with the elements of the already well defined Pushkin mythology amplified and redefined to conform to the ideological exigencies of the Soviet period. An editorial entitled “Glory of the Russian People,” which ran on the front page of Pravda on February 10, 1937, reads like a litany of the basic lineaments of the Soviet Pushkin cult. It opens with an invocation of the version of Pushkin’s death that, harking back to Lermontov, would remain standard for the Soviet period: “A hundred years Introduction

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have passed since the greatest Russian poet, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, was shot by the hand of a foreign aristocratic scoundrel, a hireling of tsarism.”71 However, the article goes on to say, Pushkin lives on, and his immortal heritage—along with the cultural empowerment it entails—has now passed to the Soviet people: “Pushkin is completely ours, Soviet, for the Soviet power inherited everything that is best in our people, and it itself is the embodiment of the best aspirations of the people. . . . In the final analysis Pushkin’s creation merged with the October socialist revolution as a river flows into the ocean.” Pushkin, as the voice of his people, is now recast as an agent for bringing literacy to the masses—“Hundreds of millions of people began to speak for the first time through Pushkin’s lips”—and his traditional role as creator of the Russian literary language is inflated into an expression of Russian cultural superiority: “Pushkin elevated our language—by its nature rich and flexible—to an extraordinary height, making it the most expressive language in the world.” Pushkin even serves as a justification for Soviet cultural imperialism: “Pushkin is equally dear to the hearts of Russians and Ukrainians, Georgians and Kalmyks, dear to the hearts of all the peoples of the Soviet Union. . . . Pushkin long ago outgrew the boundaries of his country. All progressive, cultured humanity stands on bended knee before his genius.” Pushkin had now been mustered into the service of the new regime as proof of the importance of Russia’s past and future contributions to history.

The 1937 Pushkin jubilee established the premises of the Pushkin myth as it was to function in Soviet society. Pushkin had been sacralized, forged into the center of a secular cult that nonetheless drew its emotional force from the wellsprings of religious zeal. Around the figure of Pushkin an entire cosmology was cultivated, a blackand- white universe divided clearly between heroes and villains who were defined ethically by their relations with Pushkin and served to validate Pushkin politically through their own class allegiances.

On the side of evil were arrayed Pushkin’s enemies—d’Anthès, van Heeckeren, Nicholas, Benkendorf, and the aristocracy—characters associated with the hated tsarist regime and pernicious foreignness. Featured most prominently on the side of good were Pushkin’s friends among the Decembrists, close ties with whom added credence to Pushkin’s image as a revolutionary poet, and the poet’s peasant nanny, Arina Rodionovna, who appeared as a surrogate mother to the son neglected by his unfeeling, aristocratic parents and thus linked Pushkin to the “common people.”

Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that there was only one “Soviet” Pushkin. What we might term “Pushkin for the mass reader” was the most widely propagated version—and, perhaps the one most closely implicated in the official mythology. This was the Pushkin whose verses every Soviet child began to memorize as soon as he or she began school, if not before, and whose biography, reduced to something of a simplistic catechism, was a standard part of the school curriculum. The emphasis here, as in virtually all Soviet humanities schooling, was on rote learning of canonic texts—favoring those of Pushkin’s works that could most easily be made to support the official image—and canonic interpretations of those texts. This schoolbook Pushkin shades over into the Pushkin of popular biographies, such as A. I. Gessen’s 12 Moika Embankment (1969).72 This book, which takes as its title the address of Pushkin’s last Petersburg apartment, is steeped in Pushkin lore and written in a style overladen with saccharine sentimentality. The opening paragraph sets the tone and motivates the structure of the book: “The antique clock on the fireplace in the study of Pushkin’s last apartment shows 2:45. At this moment on January 29 (February 10), 1837, the poet’s heart stopped. And every year on this day, at this hour, gather here the descendants of those who stood on that distant day before the windows of Pushkin’s apartment and holding their breath followed the beating of the poet’s pulse.”73 Gessen here Introduction

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begins from the end and, tracing the events of the months that Pushkin lived in the apartment on the Moika Canal, views the poet’s life from the vantage point of his death. This reverential approach invests every trivial incident with a sort of ominous solemnity characteristic of popular discourse on Pushkin. Books like Gessen’s, and the maudlin fascination with the details of Pushkin’s life—or, more accurately, death—to which they pander seem to have met a serious demand, at least among a certain segment of the Soviet readership.

At the other end of the social spectrum from these Pushkins for the general reader stand scholarly Pushkin studies, the symbolic center of which is the prestigious Pushkin House in St. Petersburg. Though Pushkin scholarship in the Soviet Union suffered, especially during the Stalin period, from the politicization of the Pushkin myth, it also unquestionably drew impetus and resources from the pivotal role accorded Pushkin in Soviet culture, producing valuable textological studies and research into the historical details of the poet’s life. Nonetheless, the very ponderousness of the academic apparatus devoted to Pushkin confirmed his canonic status, and most Soviet Pushkin scholarship has subscribed to the vision of Pushkin as a realist writer committed to political reform.

All of these Pushkins to a greater or lesser extent participated in the official cult of Pushkin. Yet the ability of the Pushkin myth to survive with its basic legitimizing associations intact, under regimes representing radically different ideologies, testifies to what one commentator has termed the “multivalence” of the mythic structure.74 The subversive potential of the myth among the intelligentsia became abundantly clear in the mid-1960s, when, beginning, ironically, with a demonstration against the arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel on December 5, 1965, political dissidents adopted Pushkin Square in Moscow as the site of their protests. In line with the longstanding tradition of the poet as an opponent and even rival of political authority, oppositionists chose Pushkin, quite literally, as

a rallying point. As Khodasevich had prophesied two generations earlier, Pushkin became a symbol—a sign of recognition—of intelligentsia values antithetical to the regime.

If the version of the Pushkin myth that implicitly empowered dissidents in their antigovernment activities shared a certain solemnity and reverence for Pushkin’s authority with the official cult, there flourished another “unofficial” Pushkin, one that perhaps came into existence even during the poet’s lifetime, that was impious in its very conception. This was the caricature of Pushkin that figured in pushkinskie anekdoty—various forms of verbal play ranging from obscene limericks to nonsense sayings and political jokes.

This Pushkin coexisted peacefully with the sacralized Pushkin, perhaps serving as a sort of foil that simultaneously deflated and reinforced the myth.75 Here is one example that subtly pokes fun at the Pushkin cult itself: Stalin is sitting in Heaven, and Pushkin comes to see him. “Look,” he says, “I had a girlfriend named Anna Kern. Can she be transferred to Heaven?” Stalin calls Beria [head of the secret police] and tells him, “Kern has to be transferred to Heaven.” Beria answers, “Well, you know, there’s no room.” And Stalin says to him: “But it’s Pushkin who’s asking!” “All right,” Beria answers, “I’ll do it!” Pushkin comes to Stalin again and again and asks for more and more favors until finally Stalin in exasperation calls Beria and says, “Ask d’Anthès to come here.”76 Pushkin’s role in Russian and Soviet society might best be conceived in spatial terms. The Pushkin myth removes Pushkin the poet and the man to a metaphorical sacralized space within the culture, a space marked by the exalted language that is the only officially acceptable mode of discourse in speaking of him.

This metaphor is realized in the consecration of specific spaces to Pushkin, beginning with the unveiling of the Pushkin statue in Moscow in 1880, which also heralded the beginning of Pushkin’s apotheosis. In the Soviet period so-called “Pushkin places” Introduction

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(pushkinskie mesta) have proliferated, and virtually every locale linked with the poet’s life, from the estate at Mikhailovskoe to the apartment where he died, was painstakingly restored and transformed into a museum, serving as a place of pilgrimage for the poet’s admirers.77 Seen in this light, the various incarnations of the official Pushkin exist in a cultural space separate from the irreverent manifestations of the anecdotal Pushkin, and an invisible but no less absolute boundary lies between them—a boundary that may be crossed only at one’s peril.

ɷɸɷ It is precisely the boundary between the revered and the irreverent Pushkins that Sinyavsky transgresses from the very beginning of his Strolls with Pushkin. He sets off on his meanderings through the “sacred verses” of the poet with the Pushkin of pushkinskie anekdoty as his companion in hopes of circumventing the “wreaths and busts” that enshrine the canonic Pushkin and finding the “beautiful original.” This initial border violation defines the course of Sinyavsky’s strolls throughout. At every step he challenges accepted dividing lines—between writer and critic, author and character, sacred and profane, art and life—in order to undermine the commonplaces of the Pushkin myth as well as the understanding of literature as a reflection of reality that the myth entails. His project, moreover, rests on an internal contradiction. If strolling is by definition aimless motion, how can one stroll in search of something? This paradox is ultimately resolved when Sinyavsky reaches his goal only to discover that it is “zero,” that it lies in the very imposture embodied in the anecdotal Pushkin with whom he began. His strolls have both attained their object and gone nowhere and thus become a paradigm for “pure art”—art that transcends purposes external to it and becomes an end in itself. As Sinyavsky observes, “Art strolls.”

Thus, as much as it is about Pushkin, Strolls with Pushkin is also about the free play of language in the literary text, and the metaphor of strolling is enacted in the idiom and structure of the work itself. Sinyavsky constantly breaches critical decorum, mixing lyrical effusions with colloquialisms and labor camp slang, playing havoc with chronology, and allowing his narrative to be carried along by the flow of metaphors that stand the clichés of the Pushkin cult on their heads.

The unorthodox gambols of Sinyavsky’s language have sometimes bewildered and more often enraged Russian readers. Marya Rozanova, in a recent article on the response to Strolls with Pushkin, gives as a case in point two rather ludicrous reactions to what has become the most notorious line in the work: “Pushkin ran into high poetry on thin erotic legs and created a commotion”: It began, of course, with the thin erotic legs. “Marya Vasilevna,” a respected old doctor, stopped me one day in a Russian bookstore in Paris. “Where did Andrei Donatovich get the idea that Pushkin had thin erotic legs? After all, even in the notorious book Pushkin’s Don Juan List there are no instructions to the effect that his legs were erotic.” And I explained at length that since he was not running into a drawing room, but into poetry, these were not literal legs, but what is called a metaphor, and I consoled myself with rationalizations: well, he’s old, well, he forgot. . . . But then not long ago the remarkable Russian writer Georgy Nikolaevich Vladimov asked: “Andrei Donatovich,” he said, “where did you get the idea that Pushkin had thin legs? After all, it is well known that he was a very athletic person.” It is some kind of sorcery: the man wrote a whole novel-metaphor and stumbled over those legs.78

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socialist—many people have begun to read by syllables and only literally.”

Even more disturbing, as the controversy over Strolls with Pushkin has revealed, is the extent to which Russian culture’s investment in a realist aesthetic is tied to a deep-seated allegiance to language control. Two émigré articles published in the wake of the appearance of Sinyavsky’s work in the West express the anger and even fear that language given free reign evokes in Russian readers.

The title of one early review of Strolls with Pushkin, “A Boor’s Strolls with Pushkin,” by Roman Gul, the editor of the New York— based New Journal (Novy zhurnal) vents the critic’s disgust with Sinyavsky’s book while also suggesting the deeper issues at stake.

Gul plays throughout on the dual meaning of the Russian word kham, which signifies both “boor” and the biblical name Ham. In Genesis Ham sees his father’s nakedness and tells his brothers, who rush to cover what he has seen. Gul writes, “I am using the word kham in the biblical sense—as the cynicism of man and mockery of that which in human society should not be mocked if society does not want to turn into a herd of orangutans.”79 Inveighing against Sinyavsky’s “Smerdyakovish style” taken “directly out of the thieves’ barracks at Dubrovlag,” Gul maintains that it is not “what Abram Tertz wrote about Pushkin” but “how he writes about Pushkin”80 that is so offensive. The crux of Gul’s argument, then, lies in the accusation that Sinyavsky’s use of language in Strolls with Pushkin is inappropriate to its subject, for “true art is holy, . . . the name . . . of Pushkin . . . for me is holy.”81 The violation of linguistic decorum thus becomes a threat to society, because it challenges authority by revealing what should remain covered.

Solzhenitsyn’s 1984 article on Strolls with Pushkin, “. . . Shakes Your Sacrificial Altar,” draws its title from the concluding lines of Pushkin’s famous 1830 lyric “To the Poet,” in which Pushkin warns the poet to pay no heed to the fickle tastes of the crowd: “Are you

satisfied with your work? Then no matter if the crowd abuses it/ And spits on the altar where your fire burns,/And in childish playfulness shakes your sacrificial altar.” It is Sinyavsky’s “childish playfulness,” which Solzhenitsyn views as sacrilegious in relation to the sacred person of the poet, that disturbs the writer. He repeatedly refers to Strolls with Pushkin as a “dance” that lacks a logical structure and leads nowhere. Observing darkly that it was only to be expected that once in emigration, and therefore freed from censorship, such “aesthetic nihilists” as Sinyavsky would immediately attack Pushkin in their attempt “to represent this universal irony, play, and license as a self-sufficient New Word,”82 Solzhenitsyn insists that an attack on Pushkin is an attack on all authority. Language unrestrained thus becomes for Solzhenitsyn, as for Gul, a threat to the very foundations of society.

Following the publication of an excerpt from Strolls with Pushkin in the Soviet Union in 1989, Sinyavsky and his book became a symbolic focus for the anxieties and rancor unleashed by the collapse of the Soviet system. Strolls with Pushkin was perceived by Sinyavsky’s detractors as an assault on one of the most fundamental legitimizing symbols of Russian national identity. When asked why Sinyavsky’s work created such a furor in the author’s homeland, one conservative critic told the following story in response: Not long ago I was in my native village, and I was standing in front of a church that had been destroyed. An old woman came up to me and I asked her when the church had been destroyed. She told me in 1932. She had still been a little girl and now she was an old woman and obviously the offense had festered in her soul for such a long time that she told me, a stray passerby, who happened to have gotten out of a car and gone up to the church. . . . She told me, “I was a little girl and when they were destroying everything, I grabbed an icon and ran away with it, but when I was almost home, a man with Introduction

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a bag and with a revolver in his belt, tore the icon away from me and trampled it before my eyes.” . . . When all of these holy things are trampled, when there are no more icons or very few, Pushkin is one of those icons. He is an icon equal to the icons of the church.83

So thoroughly had Pushkin become sacralized over the century and a half since his death, so profoundly had he become a symbol of Russia’s national worth, that trampling the icon of Pushkin appeared tantamount to destroying Russia’s culture and spiritual heritage.

Strolls with Pushkin is not an attack on Pushkin. It is, however, an assault on a particular image of Pushkin that is inextricably linked with the solemn and formulaic language of the Pushkin cult. The effect of Strolls with Pushkin might best be likened to the play of language in the Pushkin joke that runs: “I am washing, washing my Pushkin places.”84 Though the bawdy play on the conflation of “Pushkin places” and “private parts” comes through only weakly in English, we can nonetheless catch an echo of the linguistic subversion, the spice of which originates in the collapse of the boundary between sacred and profane. Strolls with Pushkin, like the joke, aims to shock, entertain, unsettle, and ultimately beguile the reader into a new, livelier appreciation of Pushkin and of the liberating potential of language.

PRAISE FOR STROLLS WITH PUSHKIN “In the guise of a spirited, iconoclastic study of the presiding deity of Russian literature, the great Andrei Sinyavsky (writing as his bolder alter ego, Abram Tertz) has composed an ardent and fastidious attack on philistinism in all its forms: literary, psychological, and political.”—S USAN S ONTAG “In his alter ego as Tertz, Sinyavsky was the David to every institutional Goliath, picking off the monumental cult of the national poet of the Stalin period and the sentimentalized icon of Russia abroad.

His shock tactics were Pushkinian: irreverent wit, conversational tone, thinking outside the box. And guess what? Pushkin was no saint, but his genius is supremely alive and human in this brilliant appreciation. All readers should find in this spirited classic of literary and cultural criticism, vibrantly translated, expertly introduced and annotated, license to our own individual musings with two great writers and writing.”—A NDREW KAHN, professor of Russian literature, University of Oxford “This translation of Sinyavsky’s subversive text achieves the impossible, shocking, entertaining, and beguiling us into a freer, more lively appreciation of the liberating power of language.”

—CATHY PORTER, Independent Russian Library Columbia University Press / New York cup.columbia.edu ISBN: 978-0-231-18080-1

9 780231 180801

Printed in the U.S.A.